Gaming Elitism

It should come as no surprise (I hope) that I have rather strong feelings about people feeling they are better than others.  I also realize, in many ways, I may come across as a hypocrite saying that.  After all, don’t I word my rants from a “place of authority” I am not necessarily entitled to?  On the other hand, things annoy me and I have to talk about them somewhere, so you poor wretches get to deal with it.

Just recently, I read an opinion going roughly thus:  “I hate it so much when people play Skyrim because it’s popular without playing all of Bethesda’s other games”. 

Changing the World

It seems like an odd thought to strike one, when thinking about video games, but here it is, what I've been guiding myself toward:  I want to change the world.  I know, odd, right?  But it makes sense to me.  It came to me when writing about my future development plans.  But I think it had originally come to me far sooner, just not in so few words.  I'd struggled, before, with trying to justify why I want to do this.  I have other plans too, naturally.  I want to start a clothing store.  I want to make many people happy.  I want to tell my stories.  But most of all, I Want to change the world.

I've long labored under the impression there's nothing I can do.  I'm just one young woman, what worth am I that I can do this?  It may be the hours of work, the early waking up to do more work, and mass amounts of caffiene speaking, but I think, anymore, that answer is "a hell of a lot".  After all, it only takes one person to plant an idea.

I've already had to fight, some, for my game ideas.  My professor loves them, and he agrees with my goals.  It's my classmates that don't understand, or maybe just don't care how I do.  I have had too many questions about why my protagonist isn't pretty enough, for me to take any joy in answering them.  In the end though, I think she's pretty.  That alone is a strange thing, for at least in a physical sense she's a blatent self-insert. (There are NOT enough fat characters in video games that are not jokes, honestly.)

I've been asked just what I feel I have to prove.  I think the time will come sooner than I think that I have to list out my reasons, bluntly, with the same freedom I feel with the relative anonymity of the internet.  That scares me, I'm not going to lie.  These are people I'm at least going to have to work with until I get my degree, and after that, it's a general public I'll have to answer to.

I do not have big ambitions, for all my ambitions are worldchanging.  I know the way the world works at the moment.  If I tried to change the world in a major studio, I would probably be squashed in the culture.  I refuse to compromise my goals.  This might make me a royal pain in the ass, but I still refuse to capitulate.  I think I have important things to say, and with the way the world is going, I feel more and more that games are the way to do it.

Change, after all, often seems to start with the young.

Then again perhaps I'm a strange revolutionary in desiring my players to use their brains for a change and not handing things to them on a silver platter, yet I am NOT their adversary.  Challenge, yes, unfair, no.
But that's for another time.

At any rate, that's what I want of my life.  To change the world.

Can't say I don't dream big.

Attention

Just seeking attention.

I hear it all the time.  "Ignore her, she's just seeking attention" "man, what an attention seeker" "Why do you dress that way?  It just gets attention!"

I am perhaps the last person who should be writing these words.   I like to avoid attention, for the most part, unless it be that of close friends.  On the other hand, in a part of me I try to deny sometimes, I thrive on it.  I love being on stage, I love singing for people.

But it's just attention seeking.

Isn't it?

So what if it is?  Why has wanting attention become just a bad thing?

Or is it just because I'm a woman? Sometimes I wonder if that is truly the case.  Sit down, shut up, listen, know your place.  Why not talk over me?  I'm just seeking attenion anyway.

More and more, I can't see the problem with wanting attention.  Mind you I have a problem with shoving your head up your ass to GET that attention, but in general, wanting to have your existance acknowledged?  What is so wrong about that?

Shame based marketing

About a week ago, I was helping my mother un-decorate our christmas tree.  Okay, More like I was doing the undecorating while she handed me what she could from her arm chair and watched TV.  Now I don't really watch TV (at all), but I am not entirely opposed to an episode or two of the Flying Nun or episodes of How it's Made or things like that.  However what I AM opposed to is shame based marketing.

"But Mel," you may ask, "what do you mean?"  Well.  It's both simple and infuriating.  Not only is it that, but it is harmful.  Perhaps it is just words, but when I see stuff marketed, especially to fat people like me, as 'guilt-free', I want to punch somebody in the face, and then possibly cut out my stomach because clearly food is bad and why is this organ wanting it so much?

To be honest folks, I've hit a point where I resent that.  I resent being told I am terrible for wanting food, and I am sick of food having a moral value.  I am MORE than sick of people trying to control me.  Part of the reason I do not watch television is because watching it means being constantly exposed to this shit and I just will not have it. 

"But that's just running away from the problem!"  right?  Perhaps it is just running away.  But if it's what I need to do to ensure I actually stand a chance of eating, that I don't just lose all desire to put something, anything in my body?  I'll take it.  Besides there's nothing I'm really missing. 

Don't get me wrong folks.  I have nothign wrong with things being advertised as fat-free and sugar-free.  We eat a lot of those in my house, being that my father is both diabetic and has a heart condition now.  Those descriptors don't bother me in the slightest.  It is when people apply moralistic rhetoric to what should be simple choices about nutrition that drives me up a wall. 

Fat is an adjective, and also a noun.  It is a perfectly normal word.  And yet at every turn people such as myself are told to not use it, to sue words like chunky, fluffy, pudgy.  Screw that.  I am 5'6, 385 pounds.  I.  am.  Fat.

And I am TIRED of being shamed.